Now if Christians unsettle everything by wars, burnings, fury, rashness, fierceness, sedition, plunder, and insurrection, where is meekness? Where is moderation? Where are the holy deeds that should move the hearts of pagans to glorify God? Where is the blameless and inoffensive way of life?
Where is the humanity? Finally, where is the meek and gentle spirit of Christ? . . . Shame, shame on those who in violation of Christ’s law greedily lay waste to Indian realms, which are filled with innocent persons, like most rapacious wolves and ferocious thieves under the pretext of preaching the gospel! But the Lord lives, and they shall not escape his hand.1
Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican theologian and protector of the Indians in the early Spanish colonies, did not hold back in his In Defense of the Indians (1548–1550). He responded to those who called the Indians vile and barbaric, a lesser form of humans who by natural law should fall under the protective mantle of Spanish civilization. According to this reasoning, Spaniards could force them to convert, and to perform the many tasks that the new colonial economy demanded of them. Las Casas said no. Convert them by peaceful means, by following the example of Christ and the apostles. In this way the true message of Christ could demonstrate its beauty and power.
Las Casas fought for the principles of love, justice, and compassion that are inherent in most religions. He believed in the potential of the human spirit, and the power of religion to overcome the sordid political and economic realities that shackled the weak. He continued to fight against the political powers, material objectives, and fears that eroded religious idealism. He fought both for and against the “other.” Individuals and groups have looked on those different from themselves with suspicion. Differences in language, religion, foods, and appearance lead to prejudices, often based on fear and misunder-standing. These all too frequently irrupt in discrimination, repression, and violence.
Our concern in this chapter is to capture some of the conflicting impulses in the struggles over social questions. Religions seldom retreat into the spiritual realm and ignore the world around them. This might be the case in a few
hermetic and monastic traditions, but it does not represent the mainstream of religious history. We are interested in how religions view the great problems of life, and how they address them. Specifically, this chapter explores the problems of slavery, liberalism, the social question, and what we call modern morality.
Slavery
Despite his ardent defense of the Indians, critics have noted that Las Casas was ambivalent about slavery. In 1516 he supported the idea of bringing both white and black slaves to the Caribbean to replace the rapidly declining Indian population. In 1518 he restricted advocacy of slavery to Africans. He later regretted this position, and categorically denounced African as well as Indian slavery. The debate over Las Casas and his position on slavery hints at the ongoing controversy over religion and slavery. Slavery was the pivotal, all-embracing question with which religions struggled.
Christianity’s record is controversial. In the early years of the church, slaves became Christians, and Christians became slaves; even Pope Pius I in the second century was a former slave. Slavery was such an entrenched part of the social order that Christians did little to advocate its abolition, but they did express concern for the treatment of slaves. In council after council the formal church demanded the protection of slaves, their humane treatment, and in many cases their manumission. The acceptance of slavery as a part of the social order did not imply a spiritual hierarchy. Slave and free achieved equality in the sacrament of baptism, and this theological equality superceded the inequalities in the social order. Christianity understood slavery as something that would lose its validity with the advent of the kingdom of God. In this kingdom all would be one in Christ; literally there would be “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female” (Galatians, 3: 28). Scriptural forecasts were long delayed, and slavery, while it gave way to serfdom in Europe, found new strength in the Americas in Caribbean plantations, and then in the low-lying regions of tropical America, and finally in the middle and southern colonies of British America.
Some interpretations of the church prefer to look at the long history of religious opposition to slavery, and the final triumph of abolitionists in the nineteenth century. The evidence of papal encyclicals, beginning with Pius II’s Magnum Scelus (1462) which called slavery a crime and condemned it along with slave owners, carries some weight in the arguments, but the reality of the continuation of slavery in many Christian countries cannot be denied.
Other interpretations minimize the importance of religion, arguing that abolition was a consequence of economic changes that made slavery less profit-able. Material rather than spiritual motivation led to the abolition of slavery.
The evidence here is mixed. The abolitionist movement found its origins primarily in Britain, which ended the slave trade in 1807, and then emancipated
slaves in all of its colonies in 1833. Portugal, in a move smacking of the worst kind of moral turpitude, banned the slave trade north of the equator since it still profited from the trade in the global south.
The case of the British Caribbean (and Cuba and Brazil) supports the economic argument. Sugar production peaked in the late eighteenth century, leading to surpluses, falling prices, and demands to curtail production to boost prices. In Cuba and Brazil, both Catholic countries with land for the expansion of a slave economy, slavery persisted longer than in the English colonies, or in the newly independent Latin American states. This is correct, but it is also important to recognize that the abolitionist movement started before the sugar economy and the transatlantic slave trade weakened.
Slavery in the United States
From the 1790s to the 1840s a movement known as the Second Great Awakening stirred the United States. Preachers mesmerized crowds with their calls to repent and reform, and with salvation for each sinner who experienced an inner conversion. Methodists, along with Presbyterians, Baptists, and Con-gregationalists, led the emotional charge. In addition to individual salvation, preachers reflected on broader social problems of good and evil. The darkest evil, now intolerable, was slavery. The continued existence of slavery prevented the creation of a more just and Christian social order. Abolition naturally followed as a part of revivalist thinking, although not all revivalists condemned slavery, and very few of them advocated equality between blacks and whites.
An important product of the late eighteenth-century Christian revival was the African-American church. Blacks, both slave and free, witnessed and participated in the revivals, and formed their own parallel churches, using many of the same techniques as the white evangelists. Exuberance and spon-taneity characterized the meetings, with preachers shouting and congregations responding. Black churches and the abolition movement gained strength from the Second Great Awakening, and took definite shape as the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816. The church grew steadily throughout the East and Midwest until after the U.S. Civil War when blacks, then free to choose their own religion, rushed to join the church, quickly transforming the tiny sect into an influential denomination.
The growing regional rift over slavery in the United States led to Civil War between 1861 and 1865. There are many explanations for the war, but the fury over slavery cannot be minimized. Religion was used as a justification for actions on both sides. In the South, pro-slavery advocates dipped into the Old Testament to find evidence of the acceptance of slavery. Southern society for two centuries had been nurtured on a Christianity of dominance and exclusivity, not one of tolerance and questioning. Christianity was one defense for protecting a society increasingly at odds with the emerging modernity of the nineteenth century.
In the North abolitionists turned to the Bible as well, this time to the core New Testament teachings that emphasized love, charity, and equality in the spirit of Jesus Christ. Slavery was incompatible with a theology that spoke of love and justice. It was an ugly and vicious tool to uphold a social system built on prejudice and hate. Slavery began to fracture the mainline Protestant denominations in the United States, with Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists splitting into southern and northern branches. The Southern Baptist Convention (1845), which defended slavery, was the most powerful southern church, and grew in the twentieth century into the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
The Civil War in the United States did not end slavery in the Americas.
That only came in 1888, when Brazil finally abolished it by royal decree. After almost two millennia of hate and heartbreak, slavery came to an end in the Christian world. Yet there are deplorable codas to the story, as an example from Brazil makes clear. There the sugar cane industry in the 1980s “relied on the slave and semislave labor of seven thousand Indians.”2The difference between Brazil of the 1980s and 1880s is that slavery exists only on the margins of society, and is repudiated by all political persuasions. Christian groups, as in the past, are at the forefront of abolishing these modern forms of slavery.
Islam and slavery
Interpretations of Islamic slavery are often less critical than those of Christian slavery. The interpretation rests on the Qur’an and its emphasis on the fair and humane treatment of slaves. Slaves could only be taken in war, and since Muslims could only fight a defensive war (at least theologically), nothing approaching the slave trade of the Atlantic Christian nations developed in Muslim territories. Muslims accepted slavery, including that of women and children, but also insisted that masters treat slaves well. Slaves had the right to own property, serve as high-level functionaries, and ultimately, in some cases, to purchase their own freedom. Muslims, as did some Christians, encouraged manumission, and saw it as a virtuous act. This view of Islamic society became widely accepted as scholars in Europe and then the United States started studying North Africa and the Middle East. They concluded that slavery was more humane among Muslims than Christians.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Muslims started debating slavery, and questioning the ultimate intent of the Prophet Muhammad when he wrote about slavery. Some argued that he believed that slavery would ultimately become anachronistic, and fall before the rise of modern customs. Others held that “the slavery of Islam is interwoven with the Law of marriage, the Law of sale, and the Law of inheritance, of the system, and its abolition would strike at the very foundations of the code of Muhammadanism.”3In reality, toward the end of the nineteenth century, slavery was still entrenched in many Muslim countries, and there was no widespread repudiation of the institution. In the
same 1888 encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII commended Brazilians for abolishing slavery (In Plurimus), he lamented a slave trade conducted by Muslims that reached 400,000 a year. The debates over slavery that started in the nineteenth century finally led to its abolition in Oman in 1970, the last Middle Eastern country to formally end slavery and the slave trade.
The widespread denunciation of slavery in the Muslim world has not led to its complete eradication. The situation in Sudan is the most blatant example of the perpetuation of a slave system. In contrast to the case of Brazil, slavery in the Sudan is a part of a political campaign of cruelty that attacks dissenters from the regime. Most of the hate is directed toward African Christians in the southern part of the nation. In the late 1990s religious and political leaders throughout the world started to speak out against the horrors in Sudan, but as of this writing little had been done to change the situation.
Slavery in Asia
A brief mention of slavery in Asia helps to understand how different theological and cultural realities influenced the institution’s development. Slavery had a long history in the Asian world, and the Buddhist sangha (religious com-munity) included slavery, and accepted its practice elsewhere. Theologically, both Hinduism and Buddhism believed in cycles of birth and death that ultimately led to the final emancipation of the individual from all earthly bondage. Karma, a cause-and-effect principle of universal application, kept the cycle moving. In other words, slaves inherited their condition because of previous defects, much as the untouchables, the lowest of the low in Hindu society were products of their past life. Liberation would only come through this natural cycle of rebirth dictated by karma. In the case of Hinduism, the caste system eventually replaced slavery.
More than anything else, the history of slavery illustrates that religion is always anchored in time, securely fastened to the society in which it lives.
Visionaries occasionally step forward, literally moving beyond their time and speaking in ways that seek to shake societies from their traditional practices.
Las Casas was such a man. He turned heads but he could not turn a culture that had built its material foundation on the sweat of Indians and Africans. He failed, but his legacy was an ongoing struggle for the emancipation of oppressed people.
Liberalism
The assault on slavery was tied to a new vision of individuals and society.
The old regimes in Europe came under attack, as the rule of monarchs and aristocrats clashed with new ideas about the rights of individuals and the need for new political organizations to support those rights. Citizens demanded constitutionalism, individual rights, broader freedoms, wider access to prop-erty, and state control over education, marriage, hospitals, and burials. At the
same time they sought more freedom of the movement of goods, people, and capital. All fell under the politics of nineteenth-century liberalism.
Official Catholic doctrine stood in the way of liberalism. The best known and most widely quoted religious statement opposing liberalism was Pius IX’s
“A Syllabus containing the most important errors of our time, which have been condemned by our Holy Father Pius IX in Allocutions, at Consistories, in Encyclicals, and other Apostolic Letters” (1864). Usually referred to as the
“Syllabus of Errors,” the document is almost a caricature of the antiliberalism of the Catholic church. It opposed just about everything taking place in the nineteenth century: freedom of education and the press, popular politics, labor organizations, new political ideologies, the intrusion of the state in the affairs of the family. In short, as the eightieth point of the “Syllabus” summarizes, the church is opposed to “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”4This was a rearguard action, a war of homilies and exhortations that attempted to damn new social currents that grew stronger with each passing year.
Despite the many differences between classical nineteenth-century liberalism and the late twentieth-century variants, there is one instructive thread of continuity. The conflict between liberalism (now often labeled by its opponents as little more than materialism and statism) and religion, both formal and informal, continues to influence popular discourse and public policy. Samuel Huntington put it in context:
More broadly, the religious resurgence throughout the world is a reaction against secularism, moral relativism, and self-indulgence, and a reaffirma-tion of the values of order, discipline, work, mutual help, and human solidarity. Religious groups meet social needs left untended by state bureaucracies.5
For many conservatives in the United States, the reelection of President George W. Bush in (2004) signaled the triumph of “traditional values” over liberalism.
Social question
Liberalism helped underscore the urgency of the “social question” in the nine-teenth century. From Berlin to Boston to Buenos Aires, cities filled with people struggling to survive. Ugly tenements lacking adequate water, ventilation, and lighting sprang up to house the rapidly growing urban population. Streets teemed with people looking for food and shelter. Increasingly crowded factories demanded more and more from the workers who were lucky enough to find a job. Little regulation existed to help workers fighting to improve conditions.
Along with the poverty came alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence. Cities teetered toward chaos as new and more flagrant social injustices seemed to threaten the fabric of society. This ferment spilled into the workplace as an increase in class consciousness among workers led to clashes with management
and the state. Individuals lacked the power to protect their interests so they banded together, forming associations and then labor organizations to further their interests.
The emergence of the radical “isms” during the middle years of the nine-teenth century added urgency to religious concern with the social question.
Socialism, communism, anarchism, and their many permutations responded to the growing anxieties created by industrialization and urbanization. Life was no longer the same, and when traditional politics failed to help, new ones emerged. Christianity changed as well, advocating new theologies to help the faithful cope. At its most extreme, Christian Socialism advocated a blend of socialism and Christianity as the way of the future. Most Christians were unwilling to go that far, fearing the consequences of revolutionary change, but many became enthusiastic supporters of theologies of social improvement. The
“Social Gospel” and Rerum Novarum stand out as two of the most powerful and influential religious attacks on the injustices of the new order.
Social gospel
Appalled by the poverty and squalor in the cities of the new industrial America, Christians went into the slums armed with a bible and plans to attack unem-ployment, illiteracy, and disease. In cities across the country, these men and women came to be called Social Gospelers, and their movement the Social Gospel. Products of a progressive interpretation of scripture, they set the precedent for combining social action with belief in Christian principles.
Out of this combination, a new theology developed. The idea of a new
“Kingdom of God” nudged aside traditional notions of theology based on a sectarian view of religion. This was not the mystical Kingdom of God promised in the New Testament, but a belief in a Christianity powerful enough to overcome the evils of society. Less concerned with denominational affiliation and traditional spirituality than with a new ethic of charity, the theology emphasized an outer spirituality of ethical and moral action.
Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist preacher and seminary professor, infused the Social Gospel with new energy in his For God and the People: Prayers of the Social Awakening (1910). He advocated a new form of prayer – not sterile, traditional prayers designed for other times and places – that would help all (including women and children) survive in the new Sodom and Gomorrahs of the early twentieth century. If sales are any indication, Rauschenbush’s message circulated widely, leading to the use of prayer as a weapon in the social struggle, not just as a method in the internal struggle for salvation.
Two elements of the reform movement dug deep into the culture and had a lasting influence. The Salvation Army, with its origins in England in 1865, has outlasted most of the reform movements started in the nineteenth century.
Founded in the tradition of John Wesley and Methodism, it is best known for its Christmas crusades to raise money for the poor, and its network of thrift